Remembering Morristown’s Confederate chaplain

Father James B. Sheeran, pastor of Assumption Church in Morristown in the late 19th century.
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By Joseph Connor

In 1871, Bishop James Roosevelt Bayley of the Newark Diocese faced a tough decision as he pondered naming Father James B. Sheeran pastor of Assumption parish in Morristown.

Could Sheeran get along with the congregation? He had served as a Confederate chaplain during the Civil War, and ill feelings from that conflict still lingered. This was especially true in a northern parish like Assumption, which had sent nearly two dozen of its sons to fight for the Union, some never to return.

Sectional differences aside, Sheeran could be a difficult man, strong-willed and insistent on doing things his way.

No other priest had asked for the Morristown assignment, however, so Bayley gave the 58-year-old Sheeran a chance, and the effects of that decision are still being felt today. Over the next decade, Sheeran built Assumption Church, still in use nearly 150 years later, and founded Holy Rood Cemetery, in which more than 10,000 people now rest.

Assumption Church in Morristown, late 19th century.

Born in County Longford, Ireland, in 1813, Sheeran came to America as a child, eventually settling in Monroe, Michigan, and working as a teacher. After his wife died in 1849, he entered the priesthood and served at a parish in New Orleans.

When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Sheeran cast his lot with the Confederacy. He believed that forcing the southern states to stay in the Union was as unjust as England’s efforts to thwart Irish independence.

But he had little use for the slaveowners who wanted to fight to preserve slavery. “Money and their negroes appeared to be their gods,” he wrote in his diary, “and for these they were not only willing to sacrifice their own children, who were now fighting the battles of their country, but even the country itself.”

In September 1861, Sheeran enlisted as a chaplain in the Confederate Army, and he ministered to a flock that included not just Confederate soldiers but also Union men who were wounded or taken prisoner. He let no one come between him and his priestly duties.

On one occasion, General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson called him on the carpet for violating orders by traveling between regiments.

“General Jackson,” Sheeran told the startled commander, “I want you to understand that as a priest of God I outrank every officer in your command – I outrank even you; and when it is a question of duty I shall go wherever called.”

Jackson may have had stood like a stone wall at the battle of Bull Run, but he quickly backed down from this feisty priest.

Sheeran witnessed bloody battles at Antietam, Chancellorsville and Gettysburg, and lamented the human cost. As the two armies prepared for battle in 1864, he described “(s)ome two hundred thousand men, drilled in the art of murder anxious to imbrue their hands in one another’s blood…Would to God that I had not to witness the approaching scenes of blood and carnage!”

In camp, Sheeran fought to eradicate the vices that have ensnared soldiers since the days of Caesar’s legions. On one occasion, he found a group of soldiers “stowed…in retired places to indulge in their favorite propensity of gambling.”

He snuck up on the card game and seized the $60 on the table. The gamblers “made use of a very rough exclamation,” he said, until they saw it was a priest who had swiped their winnings. Sheeran donated the funds to a Richmond orphanage.

On another occasion, he gave a strong sermon denouncing “the vice of impurity.” Some officers were offended, thinking “the sermon was intended for them,” he said, “and indeed they thought right.”

After the war, Sheeran returned to his parish in Louisiana. When a yellow fever epidemic swept through New Orleans in 1867, killing 3,000 people, Sheeran worked tirelessly to care for the sick and dying and to bury the dead. This experience compromised his health, and he came north, seeking a new assignment.

Sheeran arrived at Assumption in October 1871 and quickly saw that the parish had outgrown its church, a simple wooden structure built in 1848 on the site of the present rectory on Maple Avenue.

Interior of Assumption Church, Morristown.

On Sundays, an observer noted, “crowds filled every nook and corner of the little edifice, and the overflow lingered on the steps, the sidewalk, the street.” Despite the urgent need, parishioners recoiled at the cost of such an ambitious project, but Sheeran forged ahead.

As a site for the new church, he chose a lot on the corner of Madison Street and Maple Avenue, bought by the parish for $500 several years earlier and used for the parish cemetery since then.

Architect L.J. O’Connor of New York City designed the new building, and Mahlon Parsons of Morristown submitted the winning construction bid: $37,000, exclusive of altars and sanctuary windows. The bodies buried on the site were disinterred and reburied, and construction began.

In a gala ceremony on Sunday, June 30, 1872, Bishop Bayley laid the church’s cornerstone. Many guests traveled to Morristown by train, and wagons full of people came from as far away as Madison, Rockaway and Dover.

By 2 p.m., hundreds of people had gathered, “a sight somewhat unusual of a Sunday in Morristown,” a local newspaper noted. When the festivities began at 3:30 p.m., more than 3,000 people were present. Some climbed nearby elm trees to get a better view, and a reporter claimed he counted 57 people in one large tree.

Under a blistering sun, Bayley spoke to the crowd for 75 minutes. “Better lay up your treasures in the stones of the new Church than leave it to erect a costly tomb for yourself,” he told his listeners. The hat was passed, and $301 was added to the building fund.

Construction continued through the summer and fall. Locally made bricks and Ohio sandstone gave the 122- by 52-foot building its distinctive look, as did its 125-foot-high steeple. Sheeran rode herd on the project, and the job was finished by the next spring, only a year after work had begun.

On Ascension Thursday, May 22, 1873, Bishop Michael A. Corrigan, who had replaced Bayley, dedicated the church and celebrated the first Mass in it. A choir selected from parishes in Newark provided the music, and Father Edward McGlynn, a noted orator of the day, delivered the sermon.

The former church remained in place, used as the parish school, called St. Mary’s, until the current rectory was built in 1890. It was then moved to the corner of Madison Street and Macculloch Avenue, serving as a private residence until razed in the late 1960s. Also in 1890, the foundation stones from the old church were repurposed to build a low wall along Madison Street that stands to this day.

The new Assumption Church marked a milestone for Morristown, the first step in “the abolition of the barn-like structures called churches which disfigured our city,” wrote Father Joseph M. Flynn, Sheeran’s successor, a slight exaggeration since the majestic Methodist church on the Green predates Assumption Church.

Nevertheless, in the next few decades, other congregations built many of the impressive stone churches that grace Morristown to this day, such as the First Baptist Church on Washington Street, the Presbyterian Church on the Green and St. Peter’s Episcopal Church on South Street.

With the church done, Sheeran next addressed another pressing need: A cemetery to replace the one that had stood on the site of the new church. He bought 15 acres on Whippany Road, and the cemetery was named Holy Rood, an archaic term for Holy Cross.

Father Sheeran’s resting place at Holy Rood Cemetery in Whippany.

The waters were not always smooth between Sheeran and his congregation. In May 1874, Bishop Corrigan had to spend a day in Morristown refereeing an intra-parish dispute, “receiving deputations from the Malcontents as well as from the adherents of Father Sheeran,” the bishop noted in his diary.

The bickering likely arose over finances. The parish had been debt-free when Sheeran arrived, but he had taken out a sizeable loan to build the new church, and some parishioners felt he had built a church too grand for the parish’s needs.

Despite this disagreement, Sheeran’s can-do attitude won him his flock’s respect. In 1876, parishioners gave their aging pastor a final sentimental trip to his native Ireland.

When Sheeran returned to Morristown, his health faded. “It is a pitiable sight to witness the struggle of a brave man, who has been a leader among men and has always been first in the race – it is pitiable to see him strive to keep up,” a friend recalled.

Sheeran died of a stroke on April 3, 1881, at the age of 68, and is buried near the entrance to Holy Rood. The cemetery and the church he built stand as lasting monuments to Sheeran and to the wisdom of Bishop Bayley’s decision to take a chance on the former Confederate chaplain.

Joe Connor is retired from the Morris County Prosecutor’s Office, where he worked for 27 years.

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